"Certainly, mademoiselle. I laugh because I find all that very amusing."

"What is very amusing?"

D'Estreicher came a few steps further into the room and replied: "What is very amusing is to mix up into one and the same person the individual who was making an excavation under the slab of stone and this other individual who broke into the château last night and stole the jewels."

"That is to say?" asked the young girl.

"That is to say, to be yet more precise, the idea of throwing beforehand the burden of robbery committed by M. Saint-Quentin----"

"Onto the back of M. d'Estreicher," said Dorothy, ending his sentence for him.

The bearded nobleman made a wry face, but did not protest. He bowed and said: "That's it, exactly. We may just as well play with our cards on the table, mayn't we? We're neither of us people who have eyes for the purpose of not seeing. And if I saw a black silhouette slip out of a window last night. You, for your part, have seen----"

"A gentleman who received a stone slab on his head."

"Exactly. And I repeat, it's very ingenious of you to try to make them out to be one and the same person. Very ingenious ... and very dangerous."

"In what way is it dangerous?"

"In the sense that every attack provokes a counter-attack."

"I haven't made any attack. But I wished to make it quite clear that I was ready to go to any lengths."

"Even to the length of attributing the theft of this pair of earrings to me?"

"Perhaps."

"Oh! Then I'd better lose no time proving that they're in your hands."

"Be quick about it."

Once more he stopped short on the threshold of the door and said: "Then we're enemies?"

"We're enemies."

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